Carried Away

I've discovered a nasty side-effect of checking my mail obsessively: it's now nearly impossible for me to go to any other website online. Whenever I click in the URL textfield, my fingers immediately start typing "gmail.com" or "mail.google.com" while my brain hurriedly severs the thread connecting my consciousness to the originally intended URL. I am in dire need of changing my brain's cache and garbage disposal settings. I wonder if porn addicts have this problem. Maybe eventually they have trouble peeing when they go to the bathroom...because of other inclinations. (Certain valves in the male reproductive system prevent simultaneity or even close temporal proximity of certain actions. Michelle, if you're reading this, unread it and reread it in a few years).

The day before yesterday, I was swapping jokes with one of my students. He didn't seem to find any of the jokes I told him funny, Russian ones or American ones. I think my score for making him laugh was like 2/10. I almost resorted to tickling. I also told him the two Chinese jokes that I know, or rather the first two words of each, which was enough to get him giggling. He said he liked them but that he'd heard them before. Unfortunately they're PG-84 so you'll have to find them elsewhere. I'll give you a hint: one's about a naked man, a girl and a bear in a forest, the other about a gender-imbalanced shipwreck on a deserted island.

Anyway, after my colossal failure, the kid told me a few Chinese jokes he found funny. I didn't really get most of them, but here's one I kinda liked:

There's a horrible car accident in some village. 10 government officials were in one of the cars so reporters flock to the scene. When the first reporter arrives in town, she sees a row of 11 graves and a farmhand patting down the earth on the last one.
"Are these the people that died in the accident?" the reporter asks.
"Yep, 10 government officials and one local."
"All 10 died!?"
"Well...some of them were screaming that they weren't dead when I was burying them, but you know those corrupt government officials, they lie about everything."

Sadism is kind of a trend in Chinese jokes now that I think about it...

I learned a bunch of knots today and then destroyed a rice cooker without the aid of any of them. First the knots:

The Double Fisherman's Bend:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

No fish are required to do this one. It's also pretty easy, like most things once you know how to do them (the lotus position being a notable counterexample). The two ingredient knots are Double Overhand Stopper knots, so I killed two fish with two ropes. Birds are scarce what with all the pollution.

The Turk's Head:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

This one's a decorative knot, basically just a braid that wraps around in a circle. It looks cooler if you keep adding layers. Fortunately I'm using shoelaces, whose length is more finite that most things', otherwise I'd probably be sitting in the middle of a giant one of these right now, braiding furiously like a lonely grandma.

After a short foray into decorative knots, I got distracted by shibari, the Japanese art of rope bondage. Needless to say my neighbor's Internet connection slowed to a crawl as creepy Japanese men tiled my screen and masterfully bound half the women in Japan. In need of lighter fare, I turned to The Knotty Boys, who make tying your loved ones up as PG-13 as something like that can get. That is they make jokes while they tie girls up, to distract you from what's probably coming after they roll the credits. From them, I learned the Sailor's Knot, otherwise known as the Anchor Bend, which is otherwise known as the Carrick Bend (if confused, use the transitive property):


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

This simple knot is quite sexy even without a context. It's also apparently quite "reliable," as animatedknots.com claims. I'm not sure what we're relying on it to do other than not get untied, but with the shortage of reliability in this world, I'll take what I can get. In other words, everything in my room is now knotted to something else with this knot.

I think I might have picked up one or seven more on the way, but I've forgotten their names and there's a distinct lack of knot recognition software on the latest version of the Internet. Talk about an unexplored niche for bored computer science nerds.

So about the rice cooker. In case you're interested in breaking yours, here's the procedure:

1. Find a recipe for rice cooker banana bread.
2. Make the banana bread dough.
3. Pour the dough into the rice cooker pot.
4. Turn on the rice cooker.
5. When the button refuses to stay down, on account of rice cookers being smarter than their operators, tape it down with duct tape.
6. When smoke starts pouring out of the top, make sure you're on an errand somewhere. Don't worry, the rice cooker will turn off when it breaks.
7. Congratulations! Now get out that warranty, receipt, and go get yourself a replacement.

Yuan Yuan's English of the day (completely unrelated to what you're thinking):

"You want to be punishment?"